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THE 



AMERICAN 



HISTOEICAL SCHOOL: 



DISCOURSE 



DELIVERED BEFORE 



THE LITERARY SOCIETIES 



UiNION COLLEGE. 



BY GEO. P. MARSH. 




TROY, N. Y. : 

STEAM PRESS OF J. C. KNEELAND AND CO., VI CANNON PLACE. 



1847. 



i.b. 



./i/l5^ 



Hon. Geo. P. Marsh: 

SiK, — The Literary Societies of Union College, through their Commit- 
tees, would respectfully tender you their thanks for your much-admired Address, 
delivered before them at their late Anniversary, and would request a copy of 
the same for publication. 

Allow us to hope that you will accede to this request of the Societies. 
Respectfully yours, 

CHARLES C. NOTT. ) 

WILLIAM MILLS. I Fhilomathcan 

A. C. SMITH, i ^"""'y- 

HANNIBAL GOODWIN, ^ 

A. H. WATERMAN, {.Adelphic 

ALFRED D. CHURCHILL, ) ^^'''^' 

CLARENCE BUEL, '\ 

ISAAC VAN ETTEN, I Delphian 

R. D. NEVIUS, ^InsMute. 

Union College, Sept. 95, 1847. 



BURLIN&TON, Oct. 9, 1847. 
Gentlemen : 

Your favor of the 27th Sept. reached Burlington during my absence 
upon a journey, from which I have but just returned, and I have therefore had 
no opportunity of replying until now. 

I take pleasure in complying with your request for a copy of the Address 
delivered by me before the Literary Societies of Union College at their late 
Anniversary, and will forward the manuscript as soon as I have leisure to make 
a more legible transcript of it. 

I am, Gentlemen, 

Very respectfully yours, 

GEO. P. MARSH. 
Messrs. Nott, Mills, Smith, Goodwin, Waterman, CnuRcniLL, Buel, Van 
Etten, and Nevius, Committee. 



ADDRESS. 



The sagest philosophers, under all religious dispensa- 
tions, have thought the temporal condition and prospects 
of man a subject, in dignity, importance and obscurity, in- 
ferior only to the greater question of his eternal destiny. 
Indeed, man's mortal life is perhaps the darker theme ; for 
most wise men, in every age, have held that some ray of 
Divine illumination has illustrated that more momentous 
problem, in itself too hard for human solution, while the 
often-disputed topic of the constant and indefinite earthly 
progress of our race is elucidated by no revelation, and the 
hopes and fears of terrestrial man must be determined by 
the lights which nature has furnished him. Although it 
should seem that every self-conscious being, possessed of 
memory and the powers of volition, reflection and compar- 
ison, ought to be able to solve, unaided, all questions con- 
nected with his own moral or intellectual position and pro- 
gress ; yet, in this enigmatical world of ours, man is not 
left to puzzle out, by his inward light alone, the riddle of 
his own existence. To the revelations of consciousness, 
the experience of states of moral and intellectual being, 
the science of necessary truths, he may add the knowledge 
acquired through the powers of sensuous observation, the 
laws of the physical universe, the rules of practical wis- 
dom, which the discipline of thousands of years has accu- 
mulated. Man is essentially a social being ; communion 
with his kind is a condition indispensable to his moral and 
intellectual development ; to his very existence, in short, 
as man. and herein he is distinguished from the lower ani- 
mals, which, in general, are gregarious only from choice or 



the physical instinct of self-preservation. Man in soHtnde 
ceases to be human, and becomes the most imbecile of 
brutes ; but the lion, born and reared in captivity, requires 
neither the guidance of example nor the lights of experi- 
ence, for the full development of all his characteristic pro- 
perties ; and, although he has never ,seen his fellow, he 
grows up in full possession of all the general instincts, all 
the appetites, propensities and faculties of his species. He 
is by untutored nature all that by experimental nature he 
can become, and he acquires no borrowed powers or tastes, 
except such modified habits as result from a change of cir- 
cumstances, or as are forced upon him by the higher intel- 
ligence of his keeper. Man, on the contrary, learns from 
his equal, man. His earthly life, even in its rudest, most 
untaught and most unreflecting forms, is a school, whose 
lessons begin at the cradle and end at the grave ; a progress 
in the knowledge of good and evil, attended, according to 
the aims pursued by the pupil, with a perpetual sharpening 
and clearing of the intellectual vision, or an increased acute- 
ness in estimating the selfish uses of outward things, a 
constant elevation of the moral man, or a growing subju- 
gation to groveling impulses. 

The branches of knowledge especially devoted to the 
consideration of the mental powers, the duties and the high- 
er interests of man, are comprehended under the general 
name of the moral sciences. In a restricted signification, 
moral science rests upon conscious experience, not empiri- 
cal observation. It is conversant with man rather in his 
individual than in his social capacity. It teaches what he 
is, to the end that he may know what he can become, in- 
stead of prescribing rules to guide him in determining what 
he shall do. But, in a larger sense, the term embraces 
certain mixed studies, which treat of men rather tlian of 
tnan ; of the social being who is subject to human law, 
not the isolated agent that is amenable to the judgment 
of the conscience alone, and pleads before no other tribunal. 
Among these latter humbler and more uncertain studies, 
one of the most important and comprehensive in its appli- 
cations is the Science (as it is perhaps too ambitiousl)^ call- 
ed,) of History, and I propose to ask your attention to a 
few remarks upon the general character of existing histor- 



ical literature, the uses of historical knowledge, and the 
conditions which the peculiar character of our institutions 
requires in theAmerican historical school. 

History, as too generally written, has been, like romance, 
the picture of man's evil passions, and its study has served 
but to gratify that morbid curiosity of vulgar minds, which 
feeds upon the crimes, the vices, the follies and the suffer- 
ings of humanity. It has portrayed to us, not the normal 
condition of a given people, not the healthful action of its 
system of government when undisturbed by foreign hos- 
tility or internal commotion, but the spasmodic struggles of 
its wars, its conquests or defeats, the convulsive throes of 
its revolutions and its usurpations. The conqueror eclips- 
es the renown of the legislator, and the clangor of the 
trumpet drowns the voice of the arts of peace. In thus 
pandering to the demands of a depraved taste, European 
historians have been naturally led to overlook the better 
aims of their vocation, and to concern themselves less with 
their proper subject than with its external and foreign rela- 
tions. The achievements of war and the intriguing diplo- 
macy of peace are the topics of their pages, and if they 
turn their eyes to the internal affairs of the nation, it is but 
to record the triumph and. defeat of rival factions, and to 
chronicle the rise and fall of the ambitious great. This 
error in regard to the relative importance of the various 
subjects which fall within the scope of history leads to an- 
other error in the manner of treating them, amounting to 
an utter perversion of the proper style and character of his- 
torical narration. A writer chiefly occupied with the con- 
templation of scenes of strife and passion and excitement 
infallibly becomes himself a heated partizan. He espouses 
one side of every disputed theory, and turns belligerent in 
every quarrel. History renounces the sober dignity of im- 
partial narrative, ceases to be descriptive, and becomes con- 
troversial. The mists of prejudice, and of passion cloud 
the eye of the historian; he is no longer the calm observer, 
the alchemist whose patient toils find their desired reward 
in the discovery of the truth, but the partial apologist of 
the errors and the crimes of his country or his party. The 
recent historical literature of Europe, and especially that 
portion of it which is concerned with the French Revolu- 



8 

tion, furnishes abundant illustration of the truth of these 
remarks. The true character of that great event, as dis- 
tinguished from the atrocities that accompanied and the 
abuses that followed it, has hardly yet become matter of 
sober investigation. The champions of popular rights re- 
gard it as almost a new dispensation, and in their blind ad- 
miration of its principles not only do homage to the truths 
it proclaimed, but defend the usurpation in which, belying 
its own evangel, it prematurely terminated, and apotheosize 
alike the primary authors of the movement^and him whose 
rash hand destroyed the promise of its harvest, by gather- 
ing and appropriating to his own selfish uses its yet unri- 
pened fruits. On the other hand, the partisan of legitima- 
cy, in his horror of the crimes and miseries of the French 
Revolution, its contempt of royal prerogative and its sacri- 
legious invasions of prescriptive right, forgets the inhuman 
oppressions in which it originated, makes indiscriminate 
warfare upon its just occasions and its criminal excesses, 
and constitutes himself an advocatus Diaboli to resist the 
canonization of its apostles. 

But this is not the only error of the modern historical 
school. History has been written for the ruler, not for the 
people, and has been accommodated to the theory that the 
interests of the government are diverse from those of the 
subject ; that the governor and the governed stand in a hos- 
tile relation to each other ; that it is the duty and the inter- 
est of the one to demand a fair equivalent for every conces- 
sion to the other ; that the prerogatives of the sovereign 
are rights — the liberties of the subject, graces ; that govern- 
ment is not an integral part, an organ, of the nation, but 
something external to it, and connected with it only by ar- 
bitrary ties, the nature of which cannot be modified with- 
out the assent of the ruler, who, in his individual capacity, is 
held to possess a personal inalienable title to his dignities, his 
prerogatives,and his emoluments. 

Existing histories, written with such views and for the 
instruction of arbitrary rulers, are but the biographies of 
dynasties, not the story of a nation. Historical enquiries 
have ransacked public archives, and studied genealogies and 
successions, treaties, pragmatic, sanctions, and foreign pacific 
and hostile relations, but they have neglected those sources 



9 

from which alone the true history of a. people can be learned. 
They have looked upward, instead of downward and around 
them, as if one should endeavor to infer the natural history 
of the earth from a priori speculations on the probable in- 
fluence of heat, light, moisture, electricity and the atmos- 
pheric gases, on the yet unorganized matter of the globe, 
instead of reading from the pages of the open book of nature 
before him. It is quite obvious that histories composed upon 
those principles can be of little real utility to statesmen, who, 
under any form of government, aim at the greatest good of 
the whole c mimunity, and least of all in a commonwealth 
where government is recognized as being both for and from 
the people ; for a leading object of historical knowledge is 
to enable those who have either influence or authority in 
the administration of public affairs, to draw from the re- 
cords of the past, examples of practical instruction, in re- 
gard to the relations between the form and action of gov- 
ernment, considered as a cause, and the condition, charac- 
ter and fortunes of the people, considered as effects. 

The republican statesman especially, seeking the good 
of the subject, not the private advantage of the ruler, re- 
quires the knowledge of a totally different class of facts. ^ 
He must know, not the relative position, but the absolute 
condition of a country at given periods, and must in- 
quire what were the acknowledged reciprocal powers, rights 
and duties of the soverei^ni and the people ; 'how far public 
opinion was dictated by the ruler, and how far that opinion 
modified the action of the government ; what government 
actually accomplished for the protection of the subject 
against legalized oppression and intestine violence ; wheth- 
er it contributed to his advancement in knowledge and in 
art ; whether it kept itself from trenching on the domain 
of conscience, resisted ecclesiastical usurpation, and checked 
the priest from interfering with the powers and duties of 
civil government ; and, above all, how the actual condition 
of the masses, who shared not in the administration of af- 
fairs, was affected by the action of ite^ rulers. He who, by^fer.^^/ 
the solution of such questions as these, would gather the / 

richest fruit from the knowledge of the past, must add to 
the study of the sources usually consulted by the profes- 
sional historian a thorough acquaintance with the records 
2 



10 

of judicial investigations of crime and civil rights, the pro- 
ceedings of municipal and ecclesiastical corporations, the 
statistics of the domestic workshop, the course and charac- 
ter of internal traffic, the modes and objects of public and 
private instruction, the sanitary and economic condition of 
the people, the position of the learned professions, the cor- 
respondence of families and confidential friends, the char- 
acter and tendency of public amusements, the ephemeral 
popular literature of different periods, and the private bio- 
graphies of the humble as well as the great. To under- 
stand the true character of a given age, it is not enough to 
know the opinions of the scholar, the dogmas of the theo- 
logian or the international policy of the government, for 
national character is sometimes independent of all these. 
Our knowledge can only be complete by exhausting those 
obscure and neglected sources of information to which I 
have alluded, and it will often turn out that the very facts 
which the historian has scorned to record, as beneath the 
dignity of his office, do in reality shed more light on the 
true history of man than the annals of ages of warfare, or the 
alternate rise and fall of rival dynasties. It is only by a fa- 
miliar knowledge of the every-day life of a people^that we 
can acquire that sympathy of feeling which is an indispen- 
sable condition for the profitable or intelligent study of the 
history of any nation. To this end, we must know what 
have been the fortunes of the mass, their opinions, their 
characters, their leading impulses, their ruling hopes and 
fears, their arts and industry and commerce ; we must see 
them at their daily occupations in the field, the workshop 
and the market ; witness tlie solemnities of their temples, 
the ceremonies of their mourning, and the festivities of 
their rejoicing ; invade the privacy of their firesides and 
unveil the secrets of their domestic economy ; we must 
live and toil and suffer with them ; investigate the moral 
influences and the natural causes, which have conspired 10 
modify their character and control their mode of life : and 
thus, in short, qualify ourselves to determine both what 
and why they were. 

It is not to be denied that these researches are beset with 
the greatest difficulty, from the want of more abundant ma- 
terials. Engrossed as men are with the cares and pleasures 



11 

and sufferings of the day, they yet take little thought for 
the preservation of the memorials of that present hour, 
whose interests are permitted to outweigh both the recol- 
lections of the past and the hopes of the future. Savage 
tribes bury with the dead their vestments, their arms, their 
implements and their treasures, as if, by hiding from view 
every material object that could serve to perpetuate their 
memory, they sought to obliterate the remembrance of 
them from the breasts of their survivors. But enlightened 
nations are solicitous to rescue from oblivion the memorials 
of the past, and the wisest are careful to store up the re- 
cords and monuments of the passing age, for the instruction 
of the generations that are to come. It was a profound 
philosophy that dictated the Egyptian practice of repre- 
senting, upon the walls of catacombs and other permanent 
monuments, the familiar scenes of public and private, social, 
domestic, industrial and ceremonial life ; an instructive 
catastrophe, that embalmed for us the temples, the ceme- 
teries, the libraries, the forums, the markets, the workshops, 
the private dwellings, and the household gods of a Roman 
city. The pictured tombs of Thebes are fraught with 
richer loi;e then ever flowed from the pen of Herodotus, and 
an hour of buried Pompeii is worth more than a lifetime 
devoted to the pages of Livy. 

Peculiar embarrassments attend the investigation of that 
portion of modern history which, from well known causes, 
has recently assumed a greater practical importance than 
the aimals of any other period, of which we have written 
profane records. I refer to the epoch of the Reformation, 
and the four or five centuries next preceding that impor- 
tant event, when the Papal see, in jurisdiction and author- 
ity, if not in territory, was the most powerful state of Eu- 
rope. To this dark period belongs the monstrous doctrine — 
a political heresy too flagrant to be tolerated even by the 
despotisms of the East — that the sovereign and the privi- 
leged orders alone constitute the state : the inferior classes 
being neither members of the body politic nor proprietors of 
the soil. It is to this error that we are to ascribe, in a great 
measure, the jealous hatred or the contemptuous neglect 
with which the rights and interests of the humbler ranks are 
regarded by every chronicler of the middle ages, and the 



12 

consequent difficulty of extorting from such prejudiced and 
interested witnesses — unhappily almost the only evidence 
on the subject — a true idea of the real condition of the 
most numerous classes, during that long night of gloom and 
oppression, when christian Europe lay in an uneasy slum- 
ber, agitated by fearful nightmares, yet famied into an ever- 
deepening sleep by the vampyre that was draining her life- 
blood. 

The century extending from the Sicilian Vespers* to the 
popular revolt in the reign of Ricliard II. of England,! is, 
perhaps, the most remarkable and important, as well as the 
saddest portion of the period in question. It was then 
that oppressed humanity, in her blind yearnings for relief 
from burdens growing hourly more insupportable, sent forth 
that agonized wail, whose mingled tones of rage and woe, 
though half stifled by the artifices of her tasivmasters, are 
yet, after the lapse of centuries, audibly re-echoed to the ear 
of the attentive listener ; it was then that the burghers and 
peasantry of Europe, though long trained in a religious 
and political school, which tauglit but one law, that of im- 
plicit obedience to ecclesiastical and temporal superiors, 
were at length goaded by an undefined sense of intolerable 
wrong into a series of desperate but impotent efforts to 
shake off" the galling yoke, or at least to involve their op- 
pressors in the ruin which was overwhelming themselves. 
In all history there is no more melancholy spectacle, no in- 
stance of more deplorable sacrifices of right to might, than 
the triumphs of the privileged orders in their straggles with 
the populace, in the revolts of the French Jacquerie, the 
Flemish burgesses, and the English common people, in the 
fourteenth century. 

Painful as is the task of all research concerning this in- 
teresting period, there is no age which promises better to 
reward the toils of the critical inquirer, who ])roposes util- 
ity as the fruit of his labors; and the result of a careful in- 
vestigation, if undertaken in a ])hiloso])hical spirit, by a 
scholar familiar with the principles of historical criticism, 
and acquainted with all the accessible sources of knowl- 
edge on this subject, would assuredly be the reputation of 
certain historical errors now becoming popular, and the 
*1282. +1381. 



13 

vindication of truths once almost universally recognized, 
but now distasteful to some because they are supposed to 
clash with speculative opinions which have lately obtained 
currency, both in this country and in England, among per- 
sons addicted to a branch of study usually pursued with 
little intelligent reference to its bearing upon civil govern- 
ment and popular history. 

One of the most important fruits of the study of histo- 
ry, pursued with the lights and in the spirit I have indica- 
ted, will be the conviction that every homogeneous nation 
is marked by permanent distinctive traits of moral and in- 
tellectual character, and that this character is a necessary 
element to be considered in determining the appropriate 
frame and action of its government. 

National character is formed by the conjoint influence of 
external circumstances and hereditary opinions. Among 
the most active of these are climate, natural scenery, ha- 
bitual modes of life, hostile or amicable foreign relations, 
free or despotic, colonial or independent government, and, 
lastly and chiefly, religious belief. But a long period 
elapses before what were at first the passions or the im- 
pulses of individuals become the characteristics of a peo- 
ple, and ages are required to change what ages had been 
employed in producing. A knowledge of the actual traits 
of national character, thus formed, is possible only by a 
careful study of the original sources of popular history ; 
and this knowledge having been thus attained, the charac- 
teristic features having been detected and apprehended, the 
statesman must now turn philosopher, and inquire what 
concurrence of external causes and internal impulses, tem- 
porary or permanent, has conspired to produce them. He 
will thus be enabled to judge how far beneficial or injuri- 
ous influences can be strengthened or removed, how far 
valuable traits of character can be clierished, or pernicious 
features eradicated, and so to shape the policy of his ad- 
ministration as to amend that which is susceptible of ame- 
lioration, and conform to what needs no amendment, or 
is already fixed beyond the hope of change. Such are the 
views — views far more elevated than the most sagacious 
calculations of temporary expediency, commercial advan- 
tage or financial prosperity — which ought to inspire the 



14 

patriotic statesman ; but with all our vaunted intelligence 
and public virtue, we can boast of but few politicians who 
look beyond the apparent immediate results of a given 
measure, or who even aim at the establishment of a system 
of policy adapted to the temper of the nation, and founded 
on the abiding laws of political morality.. 

Our government, instead of resisting, has been smitten 
by the contagion of a growing trait in the dark side of our 
national character. We, as a people, are too impatient for 
present results. Our political husbandry rears no plants 
save those of annual growth, and we demand the harvest 
before seed-time is well past. Great measures of national 
policy can by no possibility be judged by their fruits, ex- 
cept upon the observations of years ; and the elements of 
computation are so numerous and difficult of appreciation, 
that time alone can enable us to collect them and deter- 
mine their respective values. Heedless of this great truth, 
we defeat our own experiments with the rash impatience of 
a child who breaks the half-incubated egg. that he may 
inspect the growth of the unhatched bird. We have adop- 
ted a single form of logical conclusion, post hoc, ergo prop- 
ter hoc. Our present adversity or prosperity is ascribed to 
contemporaneous or recent political measures, and, like bad 
grammarians, we uniformly refer all consequences to the 
nearest antecedent. One administration adojits a wise sys- 
tem of husbandry in our public resorrrces : the succeeding 
executive reaps the harvest, and claims and receives the 
applause justly due to the wisdom of his predecessor. 
Again, one chief magistrate commences a series of meas- 
ures which email a large expenditure upon the next ; the 
successor is condemned as wasteful and extravagant, and 
ousted to make room for a third incumbent, who must do 
homage to that public opinion which has elevated him, by 
discarding the principles of all that have gone before him, 
or by reviving some exploded bubble, which the supposed 
failure of later experiments has restored to popular favor. 

The trait to which I refer is not one of the original fea- 
tures of American character. It was not found in the 
statesmen of the Revolution, and our early legislators made 
no attempts to anticipate the course of nature. Confident 
of the soundness of their principles,they adopted such a poli- 



15 

cy as the permanent good of the country seemed to require, 
and were content to leave then* justification to time, rather 
than to suffer themselves to be diverted from the path of 
wisdom, by the lures of that political alchemy which sees 
in every new projector the lucky discoverer of the philos- 
opher's stone, and prefers the chances of empiricism to the 
less brilliant but more certain promises of established prin- 
ciple. 

The propensity in question is to be ascribed partly to the 
vacillating policy of a government which too often recog- 
nizes as a controlling principle allegiance to a party rather 
than duty to the people, and partly to our unprecedented 
and almost portentous growth under the stimuhis of free 
institutions, the impulses of youth, and the excitements of 
the boundless field of enterprise that lies open before us. 
The savage wilderness has been suddenly converted into a 
flowery landscape, the home of art and industry and peace ; 
the silent forests of the East have given place to well -till- 
ed fields, and populous towns vocal with the sounds of the 
busy market, and ringing with the blows of the craftsman's 
hammer ; the prairies of the west have exchanged the bison 
and the deer for the domestic herd, and a rank and unfruit- 
ful vegetation for the nutritious grasses, the cereal grains, 
the varied pomona, and the more delicately-organized floral 
growth of the old world. Our own hands have repeated 
and perpetuated the miracle of those Indian magicians, 
who, in the midst of a bare and desolate plain, suddenly 
conjured up before the astonished eyes of an eastern em- 
peror an elysian landscape, filled with fan- towns and bloom- 
ing gardens and groves and fertile fields and pastures teem- 
ing with flocks, chequered with caravans and civic pageant- 
ry and martial processions, and skirted by seas on which 
great fleets were riding. We are intoxicated with our suc- 
cess, and giddy with the rapidity ef our progress. Our 
prosperity has so often surpassed our most sanguine hopes 
that we habitually crave miracles, and are satisfied with no 
policy whose fruits do not overgo even our ardent expec- 
tations. We require that government shall accomplish 
more than our heated imaginations can foreshadow, and 
compel every new ruler to strain his inventive powers to 
discover some fresh stimulus, which shall produce increas- 



16 

ed action in a body politic already trembling with feverish 
excitement. Every administration must commend itself 
to the favorable regard of its supporters, and fulfill the 
predictions of its advocates, by overthrowing preceding 
systems and substituting some new wonder-working en- 
gine, whose action shall at least seem to. leave the lagging 
movements of its predecessor far behind. Thus govern- 
ment and people are continually acting and re-acting upon 
each other, and feeding that morbid appetite for novelty 
and change which threatens to deprive us of all consist- 
ence, unity and harmony of national character or institu- 
tions. 

It is not easy to assign limits to this reciprocal influence 
of government and people consistently with the popular the- 
ories of the true spirit of our American political organiza- 
tion. In certain sections of the Union, the right of the 
constituent to instruct his representative, unconditionally, 
is maintained ; and in those States where this doctrine is 
not admitted, we arrive at nearly the same result, because 
candidates are too often selected, not with reference to 
moral excellence and intellectual ability, but as the cham- 
pions of certain favorite opinions of their constituents, to 
the maintenance of which the aspirant is required to pledge 
himself in advance. We have then a fluctuating popular 
dictation under both systems ; and that, unhappily, not the 
expression of a deliberate and unbiassed public sentiment, 
because popular opinion is influenced by party leaders to 
such an extent that they may be almost said to manufac- 
ture that public will by which they profess to be guided. 
It would be invidious to exemplify, but every man's recol- 
lection will suggest instances of the sudden adoption of 
new opinions upon great questions of national policy by 
powerful parties, at the dictation of a cabal, or the mere 
nod of an individual. 

But to return to our theme, from which I have wander- 
ed, it is obvious that the wants of the age, and particular- 
ly of republican statesmen, demand a species of historical 
composition so totally different from existing models as to 
constitute a new field of literary eflbrt. We require not so 
much the history of governments as the story of man ; not a 
sketch of the outward relations of a people, but a picture 



17 

of its social and domestic life, a revelation of its internal 
economy, and a philosophical investigation of the moral 
and political causes whose action and re-action have affect- 
ed the personal liberties and the private interests and prosper- 
ity of its citizens. 

While I insist on the necessity of a new form of histor- 
ical narrative, as demanded by the popular character of our 
institutions, I beg not to be understood as denying or un- 
dervaluing the importance and utility of constitutional and 
international history. But historical literature must under- 
go the process of subdivision, to which all other branches 
of human knowledge have been subjected in modern times ; 
every department of government must have its particular 
records, and all history must become, to a certain extent, 
special. We should have, therefore, constitutional, politi- 
co-economical, diplomatic, military, legislative a.id judicial, 
as well as popular histories ; and general history must as- 
sume the form of a philosophical review, instead of that of 
circumstantial narration. But inasmuch as human govern- 
ment, human society itself, can have no other legitimate 
end than the moral and physical prosperity of the peo- 
ple, popular history must be the first of narrative composi- 
tions in dignity and importance, and all other forms of his- 
torical writing must be merely auxiliary and subservient to 
the illustration of this great theme. In the course of hu- 
man experience, there sometimes occur events or epochs of 
vast significance, followed indeed by the most momentous 
consequences, but connected with previous history by so 
slight and sometimes imperceptible threads of relation that 
they seem to stand in bold relief, as independent and isola- 
ted phenomena — the machinery^ so to speak, of history, or 
as parts of a grander system than that to which the ordi- 
nary affairs of man belong. The proper investigation of 
these falls not strictly within the sphere of any branch of 
national history, and they can be fitly described only in 
historical monographs, or works specially devoted to their 
elucidation. It is in such fields of research and exposition 
that modern narrative literature has achieved its highest 
triumphs, and most nearly realized the notion of true phi- 
losophical history. It is no mean boast to say that our own 
writers have been highly successful in this department ; and 
3 



18 

a learned, laborious, and eminently judicious American au- 
thor, in illustrating the history of the age of discovery and 
conquest, has given admirable specimens of the historical 
monograph — examples indeed of such merit that they will 
remain among the most conspicuous ornaments of modern 
literature and American scholarship, uijtil they shall be 
eclipsed by the results of his own labors in that wider 
field in which he is reported to be now engaged. 

But all special narratives, whether of constitutional 
changes, of diplomacies, or wars, or of particular events of 
Avhatever magnitude, are, from the nature of their subjects, 
too restricted in their range to obviate the necessity of his- 
torical writings adapted to the wants of a new state of soci- 
ety, and for which our own peculiar political and social or- 
ganization seems to offer special inducements and facilities. 

Far, however, as the historical literature of our times yet 
falls short of what it ought to accomplish, it is not to be 
denied that its tone and tendency have been almost entire- 
ly changed, and its character very greatly elevated, within 
a century. Fanciful conjecture has yielded to ascertained 
truth, dreamy speculation has given place to laborious re- 
search, and historians are learning that as there is, on the 
one hand, a class of theoretical conclusions to be drawn 
from facts of observation depending upon historical proof, 
so on the other there is a class of facts which may be safe- 
ly inferred from certain universal truths established by ar- 
guments independent of human testimony. 
^/^^ point of literary merit, spirited and picturesque nar- 
rative, and absorbing and well-sustained interest, the chron- 
icle^ of the thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth centuries 
are in general much superior to the historians of the six- 
teenth and seventeenth. The Old-Northern saga, of NjlJi^al, 
written certainly as early as the thirteenth, and probably 
the twelfth century, undoubtedly stands at the head of its 
class — that of family histories — and the Heimskringla of 
Snorre belonging to the thirteenth century, combines in a 
remarkable degree the qualities I have mentioned, with ex- 
traordinary philosophical acumen. Froissart, whose great 
and universally-recognized merits are displayed as advan- 
tageously in the admirable old translation of Lord Berners 
as in the original, is almost equaled by the Portuguese 



19 

chronicler Fernam Lopez, and perhaps even surpassed by the 
Catalan, Ramon Muntaner. The historical writers of the 
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries have scarcely a spark 
of the life and spirit and picturesqueiiess that make the 
older chroniclers so delightful; and they would be quite un- 
readable, were it not that they are rendered abundantly attrac- 
tive to those who indulge in literary dissipation, by the lu- 
dicrous affectations of their style, their perverted ingenuity, 
their absurd pedantry, and their quaint conceits. So con- 
spicuous are these traits, and so completely do they ex- 
clude all other merits in these writers, that we may say of 
them, as of punsters, the worst is the best. Their aim 
seems to have been the display of ill-digested erudition, 
and of dialectic skill in the maintenance of impossible hy- 
pothesis and startling paradox. Thus Goropius Becanus, a 
learned Hollander, wrote two huge volumes to prove that 
his native language was the primitive tongue, and conse- 
quently that Adam and Eve spoke Dutch in Paradise. 
Ramus the Dane proved to his own satisfaction, and the 
exceeding contentment of his countrymen, that the Scan- 
dinavian God Odin and Homer's Ulysses were one and the 
same person. But both Becanus and Ramus were com- 
pletely outdone by the ingenious, quaint, and erudite Rud- 
beck, of Sweden, who, in the compass of four thick fol- 
ios, demonstrated with abundant learning, and infinite od- 
dity of style, argument and illustration, not only that Pla- 
to's Atlantis and the Elysian fields of Greek and Roman 
mythology lay in the hyperborean realm of Sweden, but 
that all the learning of the Egyptians was borrowed from 
the sages of ancient Scandinavia. Rudbeck testifies his 
confidence in the results at which he had arrived, by invi- 
ting all gainsayers to visit Sweden, at his own proper 
costs and charges, if they were able to refute his argu- 
ments ; " provided always," continues he, "that all such 
shall first have read mine Atlantica ten Times through ; yea, 
and peradventure it shall behove to be read clean through 
twenty and more Times, before any man shall be able to 
remember him, how all mine Arguments do hang togeth- 
er." Escolano, a distinguished Valencian historian, says 
that among the relics in the cathedral of his native city 
there are two of the thirty pieces of silver received by Ju- 



20 

das Iscariot as the price of his treachery, and gravely notes 
it as a remarkable coincidence that these pieces bear the 
same image and superscription as one of the common cur- 
rent coin of V^alencia. The same writer devotes two folio 
pages to an argument to prove that certain fossil teeth in 
that collection of relics are the grinders 'of the giant St. 
Christopher : his conclusions being mainly based on the 
want of evidence to show that they are any thing else. 
These, no doubt, were idle fancies ; but what shall we say 
of the excellent Bernardo de Brito, one of the most famous 
of Portuguese historians ? This author undertook a histo- 
ry of the Portuguese monarchy, and — with something of 
the spirit of the worthy commemorated by a favorite author 
of our own, who took a run of three miles in order to leap a 
mountain — he commenced his history, as did indeed most 
of the chroniclers of his time, at the creation of the world, 
and had barely brought down his narrative to the foundation 
of the monarchy whose history he was writing, when, at 
the close of his second folio, the threads of his story and 
his life were unhappily cut short by death. Such was the 
zeal of this good monk for the honor of his country, that 
he not only invented facts, but forged authorities to support 
them, and he was even so happy as to be able to find two 
other Portuguese ecclesiastics patriotic enough solemnly to 
certify to the authenticity of the manuscripts which their 
reverend brother had fabricated. 

Although modern literature has yet produced no work 
which fulfils all the conditions essential to a perfect civil 
history, yet it has rendered a most important service to the 
cause of truth, by the discovery of tests and the establish- 
ment of rules for weighing both documentary and tradi- 
tional evidence, and determining the preponderance of con- 
flicting proofs. Historical criticism has become almost a 
science of itself, embracing numerous subordinate and aux- 
iliary branches. The rules, for example, for determining 
the age and authenticity of manuscripts, have been erected 
into a complete system. The character of the handwri- 
ting, the color and composition of the ink, the style of or- 
nament and illumination, the quality, contexture and hue 
of the paper or parchment, the water-marks, the manner of 
binding, the dialect and style of the writer, his knowledge 



21 

or ignorance of the known customs and history of his own 
time, his anachronisms, the inducements which may have 
existed for falsification, and the external evidence in regard 
to the chronology and genuineness of the instrument, all 
these are subjected to critical examination by ingenious 
and conclusive tests. By analogous rules, the genuineness 
of monumental and memorial inscriptions, and other his- 
torical evidences, is determined, and the most wonderful 
sagacity is often displayed in the detection of forgery or 
the establishment of the authenticity of ancient writings 
and records. In these investigations, the antiquary is call- 
ed to the aid of the historian, and one of the most impor- 
tant uses of antiquarian knowledge is its application to 
this species of literary chemistry. 

The tests of which I have spoken are applicable only to 
writings, inscriptions, and other material evidences ; but 
there are also rules by which traditional narrative, and the 
history of times so remote that the original sources have 
perished, are tried. It is by these that Niebuhr has exam- 
ined the early history of Rome, as recorded by Livy and 
Dionysius, and demonstrated that their narratives are little 
better than ingenious fictions or distorted traditions. Sim- 
ilar investigations have detected the most flagrant perver- 
sions of truth in many of the most celebrated histories of 
ancient and modern times. 

It is, then, as I have said but lately, that the true uses 
and purposes of history have begun to be understood, and 
that rules have been discovered for distinguishing between 
historical truth and falsehood. Many learned investigators 
are busied in refuting the errors of writers of reputation, 
and in collecting and arranging neglected or forgotten facts 
as materials for future historical architects. When this ac- 
cumulation shall have been completed, and all the sources 
of the knowledge of the past exhausted, we may look 
for a series of historical writings which, in philosophical 
character, truthful interest and real utility, shall surpass all 
that narrative literature has yet accomplished. 

I have alluded to one of the uses of antiquarian learn- 
ing, as a means of testing the value of the evidences of 
history, but it has even a higher importance as itself a 
source of proper historical knowledge. It is not easy to 



2a 

draw a precise line between the province of the antiquary 
and that of the historian, because, according to our theory 
of the uses and purposes of history, the learning of the an- 
tiquary is a part of the preparation of the historian. With- 
out that learnitig, there can be no picture of the life of man. 
There may be a shadowy outline ; but thfe details, the col- 
oring, the lights and shades, which should animate and 
individualize the representation, are wanting. In general, 
we may state that the business of the antiquary is the col- 
lection of particular facts to serve as materials for the his- 
torian — to amass rather than to arrange and classify ; the 
vocation of the historian, to investigate the connection 
between these facts, and refer them to their appropriate 
relations, as cause and effect. In a word, superinduce the 
philosopher upon the antiquary, and he becomes a historian. 
But the idea of the perfect historian involves also some 
moral elements ; and of these ^ next to the impartial love of 
truth and of his fellow-man, the most important is the 
power which distinguishes Shakspeare above all other wri- 
ters, ancient or modern, that ready sympathy, namely, 
whereby he transforms himself, for the time being, into the 
character he is depicting. This faculty is indispensable, 
not only as a means of giving life and dramatic interest to 
narrative, but because it endues its possessor with an intu- 
itive perception of the possible and the true in historical 
portraiture, an instinctive tact, whereby to test the reality 
of the scenes which the wand of the historic muse evokes, 
and to determine whether the personages of the drama are 
real flesh and blood, or unearthly, unsubstantial phantoms. 

It is to a feeling of the want of histories composed with 
the views and the knowledge, and in the spirit I have des- 
cribed, that we owe the invention of a new branch of lit- 
erature, the modern historical novel ; and that writer who 
shall achieve the task of combining the truth of sober nar- 
rative with the individuality and dramatic power of fiction, 
will realize the idea of a true popular history, and, by 
founding a new historical school, confer upon man the 
highest benefit which it yet remains to literature to bestow. 

The duties of the anticpiary begin with collection. 
What then is the class of facts which the American collec- 
tor should strive to accumulate ? This question is easily 



23 

solved, if we bear in mind that his object is the illustration 
of the history of the citizen, not of his ruler ; a knowledge 
of the character and condition of men, not the relative po- 
sition of a state ; a picture of popular life in its domestic 
and social, not in its political relations. The unique and orig- 
inal character of our political system is eminently favorable 
to the formation of a true school of popular history. Our 
government consists of imperia in imperio. The federal 
government has the exclusive charge both of the foreign 
relations of the confederacy and the internal relations be- 
tween the several states, and these of course belong appro- 
priately to the general political history of the Union. The 
local historian then is at once relieved, not only from a la- 
bor, but from an incumbrance, and his vocation is to por- 
tray the life of a people who have no external relations. 
Possessing therefore an unbroken unity of theme, he may 
maintain that unity of interest which is essential in all the 
higher works of art, but which in ordinary histories is per- 
petually interrupted by the necessary change of scene and 
actors and subject. 

We may thus look to American literature for a new his- 
torical school, of an entirely original character, and of 
hitherto unequaled interest and practical value. We are 
entitled to demand of the historic muse her crowning labor, 
the story of man as an individual and social being, rather 
than as an unconscious atom in a soulless mass, which, being 
homogeneous, has no other internal action and re-action than 
that of mere cohesive attraction. 

If these views are sound, it is obvious that the first ob- 
ject of our historical investigators should be to collect facts 
tending to illustrate the social condition of the inhabitants 
of the American States, and the various causes by which 
that condition has been produced. These embrace a wide 
range ; and a faithful account of the settlement, cultivation 
and improvement of the territory of any one Atlantic State, 
would present no imperfect epitome of the history of our 
race compressed within the period allotted to the life of an 
individual. I say Atlantic State, because in these only have 
the earlier stages of social progress been exemplified. Tih», 
physical conditions imposedon the colonists of our Eastern 
shores the necessity of an eminently primitive mode of 



24 

material life, and they had difficulties to overcome to which 
the pioneer in the favored West is an entire stranger. 
They were far removed from the home, the aid and the 
sympathy of their brethren : their numbers were few, their 
supplies small, and their implements clumsy and inartificial. 
They were inexperienced in the rude labors of forest hus- 
bandry, ignorant of the capacities of the Soil, and uninured 
to the climate. For them Nature had prepared no bloom- 
ing prairie alternately decked with beds of flowers and 
tufts of nutritious herbage, and both meadow and plough- 
land were to be wrung by hard and persevering toil from 
the bosom of the reluctant and obstinate wilderness. Here, 
then, we have first, the struggle of human intelligence 
against brute and unsubdued nature, which characterizes 
savage life ; for the first inhabitant of the forest, however 
cultivated himself, must be content with such fare and 
such habitation as spontaneous nature yields to the ro- 
ving huntsman, until well-directed industry shall have 
created an artificial world around him, and the garner is 
filled with the manifold product of the seed that was scat- 
tered but by the handful. Provision being tlnis made for 
the imperious cravings of nature, our colonist now emer- 
ges from the bounds of savage existence, and with pious 
care erects the simple church for the worship of his God, 
and the humble school-house for the education of his child. 
Municipal corporations are next organized, roads and other 
means of communication established, the law-making pow- 
er is limited and defined, courts of justice are instituted, 
the higher seminaries of learning are founded, and the so- 
cial fabric is now complete. Society has passed through 
all its phases in the life-time of one of its members, and 
there is many a living American whose own experience 
will confirm the remark of Volney, that American society, 
in its range from the life of the back-woods to that of the 
city, presents a synopsis of the history of many ages of 
European progress. Nor is it in forms alone, whether con- 
ventional or imposed by the pressure of outward circum- 
stances, that the year of America has been an epitome of 
the century of Europe. In our brief annals, we have ex- 
emplified the distinctive virtues and vices, the predomi- 
nance and succession of which characterize the epochs and 



25 

progress of society. In our pioneers are found the un- 
shrinking independence, the fearless courage, the impatience 
of wholesome restraint, the rude frankness, the gross pro- 
pensities, the fierce resentments, the hardy contempt of 
physical suffering, the generous hospitality,and the alternate 
seasons of severe labor and riotous indulgence, which be- 
long to primitive life ; Avhile their older brethren have 
contracted the contamination, as well as acquired the polish 
and the virtues, of stages of more advanced civilization. 
The means of collecting the facts necessary to illustrate 
our social progress are rapidly passing away. Though we 
have still forests to fell, and untamed nature to subdue, 
yet the arts, the forms, and the refinements of civilized life, 
have penetrated the wilderness. The citizen treads upon 
the heels of the pioneer, and the race of the back-woods- 
man is extinct. Even the imitative, or more properly 
speaking the creative arts, whose perfection has been 
thought to indicate the decline of society in older forms 
of civilization, have found a congenial soil among us. Ju- 
dicious critics have pronounced our Allston no unworthy 
disciple of the school of Titian, and the cultivated taste 
that gathers around the shrine of art in the eternal city 
does homage to the genius of the gifted sculptor, who 
was cradled upon the flank of the Green Mountains, and 
reared to manhood in the Palmyra of the West. 

We have now arrived at an auspicious moment for col- 
lecting and treasuring up the materials for the history of a 
period whose cycle is complete. We have passed the 
point when the urgent necessity of providing for the wants 
of the hour blinds us to all but the present, and we are not 
so far removed from the generation of which I have spo- 
ken that its memories are obliterated, or that our sympa- 
thies with its joys and its sorrows are blunted. 

In speaking of the accumulation of historical facts,I in- 
clude of course the collection of such material objects as 
establish or illustrate facts. These, in a country whose 
earliest records are of so brief a date, cannot be numerous, 
but it would not be difiicult to gather an interesting and 
instructive series of objects illustrative of the progress of 
improvement in the arts of social life. This progress, 
though rapid, has been so constant and uniform, that we 
4 



26 

who have been whirled along with it are scarcely conscious 
of its extent, or aware of our present distance from our 
own starting point. We can hardly conceive the revulsion 
we should experience were we suddenly carried back to 
the condition of the patriarchs of the old Thirteen. Fan- 
cy their rude cabins thinly scattered through the dreary 
wilderness, the small patches of half-cleared and half-tilled 
ground around them, the solemn silence of the boundless 
wood, scarce broken but by the echoing strokes of the axe 
and the midnight howl of the wolf as he prowled around 
the narrow fold ; follow through the dank and gloomy for- 
est the rugged, steep, and winding foot-path, that formed 
the only means of communication with the distant neigh- 
bor ; remember that they had neither church nor school, 
no physician to heal such maladies as art can master, or to 
relieve the dying pangs of the incurable ; no man of God 
to smooth the passage to the tomb. Observe the father of 
the family at his heavy toil in felling the woods, and break- 
ing up the virgin earth. How rude his implements, how 
formidable the resistance of the primitive forest, how slow 
his conquest of an untamed soil. Compare his clumsy 
plow, his ill-forged axe and his heavy hoe, with the light, 
well-balanced and neatly-finished tools of his descendants. 
Watch him as he painfully bears upon his shoulders, or 
drags upon a hand-sled, a full day's journey to the distant 
mill, the bushel of grain that is to furnish a scanty supply 
for his half-famished children ; remember, too, that with 
all this toil, he was compelled to be ever ready with load- 
ed musket to repel the lurking savage, and believe, if you 
can, that such is the picture of the lives of your own fath- 
ers, and that the now smiling fields and verdant hills of 
our Eastern States were its theatre. 

We cannot, it is true, preserve the natural features of 
the world in which our ancestors lived and labored, suffer- 
ed and enjoyed, but a complete collection of their agricul- 
tural and mechanical implements, and of the coarse fur- 
niture and domestic utensils of their humble habitations, 
would aid posterity very materially in forming a lively con- 
ception of their mode of life, and a just estimate of their 
characters. In order to judge how well men perform their 
parts, we must know what were their obligations, what 



27 

were their means of discharging them, and against what 
obstacles they had to struggle. Look then at the burdens 
of the early settlers of our Atlantic shores, consider their 
labors, their privations, their dangers, their responsibilities ; 
remember that they had at once a wilderness to subdue, 
families to feed, a political society to organize, an empire 
to found, and a country to defend. An origin so remark- 
able, so new in the history of civilization, could not fail to 
stamp the institutions of which it was the parent with a 
character as peculiar as the circumstances under which ^/Jj^y 
hauu ^^5^ formed. Doubtless our social organization has much 
in common with ftlii^. European forms, and this is the result 
partly of a spirit of imitation, and partly of the general 
law that like causes produce like eifects ; but no impartial 
and diligent enquirer can fail to be convinced that the 
best features of our system, those which give it its efficien- 
cy and constitute its excellence, are not merely improve- 
ments or modifications of European institutions, but the 
spontaneous growth and product of a new combination of 
the elements of society, under new and eminently favora- 
ble conditions. In the comparison of our institutions with 
those of the old world, we are apt to be misled by a simi- 
larity of terms, and, because ^ the poverty of language has 
compelled us to apply old appellations to new objects, to 
imagine an identity of character in things which are not 
even analogous ; and the foreign student of our public 
and municipal law is as much embarrassed by the strange 
features which present themselves under familiar names, 
as he is diverted to find some lithographic and yet unbuilt 
city of the west dignified with the name of Pekin, or 
BassQA, Persepolis, or Samarcand. We have borrow- 
ed much of the legal and political phraseology of England ; 
yet these terms are, with scarcely an exception, used in a 
new sense and applied to new objects. We might ex- 
emplify in that which constitutes the very basis, the indis- 
pensable condition of the existence of civil society — pri- 
vate rights to particular portions of the soil. We desig- 
nate estates in land by the terms of the common law of 
England, but there is in fact no analogy between our ordi- 
nary tenures and those of that country ; and even in the 
forms by which estates are transferred and legal rights es- 



28 . 

tablished, there is less resemblance than the similarity of 
the technical language of the law in the two countries 
would lead us to suppose. So, too, our political franchises, 
involving all the relations between government and 
people, rest upon an entirely independent foundation, and 
the principles which limit and secure our liberties are no 
more derived from Magna Charta than they are from the 
laws of Lycurgus. The importance of a thorough under- 
standing of this subject can hardly be over-estimated, and 
the inculcation of the truth I have just stated is one of the 
most imperious duties of the American publicist. 

I have now indicated the general purposes and primary 
sources of popular history, and the character which, as I 
conceive, ought to distinguish the American historical 
school, considered as a means of the instruction of a peo- 
ple equal in political rights, and every individual of whom 
is, potentially at least, a ruler. It only remains to point out 
more distinctly what I have already hinted at, the most 
important advantage which we may hope to derive from 
American history so studied and so written. I have adverted 
to the doctrine that nations, as well as individuals, have 
their characteristic traits, and dwelt upon the importance of 
a thorough knowledge of these distinctive peculiarities to 
those who are called either to frame or to administer a 
government for freemen. The difference of origin and 
hereditary opinion, the varying local condition and institu- 
tions of different sections of our country, combined with 
the influence of that policy which indiscriminately admits 
all comers to an equal participation in every right and eve- 
ry franchise, have hitherto prevented the American people 
from acquiring a consistent and well-defined predominant 
character, and this is one of the causes of the vacillation 
and instability of our public policy. But our free institu- 
tions are nevertheless based upon certain traits of character 
and certain hereditary principles, the maintenance of which 
IS absolutely essential to the permanence of the valuable 
features of our social and political system. A just compre- 
hension and appreciation of these traits, and an intelligent 
perception of the relations between them and those institu- 
tions which have sprung from them, is attainable only by the 
study of our history in the spirit and with the aids which I 



29 

have attempted to describe. By such a study of the founda- 
tion upon which our rights and liberties are buiU, we shall 
acquire not only a knowledge of its structure, but a sympa- 
thy of feeling and a concurrence of principle Avith those 
who grounded it and laid the corner stone ; and a compar- 
ison of the spirit of our history with the traits which mark 
the annals of Europe, will prepare us to appreciate the 
value of a political system which abridges no right for the 
aAx^ vailw of conferring privileges, imposes no restraints on 
man's free intellectual or spiritual action, requires no tests, 
commits no treasonable encroachment on the prerogative 
of the Deity, knows no legal difference between the hum- 
blest citizen and the highest functionary, the layman and 
the ecclesiastic, sets up no man as an ideal personification 
of the state, a human idol, calling on all men to fall down 
and worship. There can be no surer bulwark of national 
independence, no safer pledge of national honor, than the 
generous pride which the faithful study of our own history 
will inspire, and that American will deserve best of the 
land of his birth who shall most forcibly impress upon you, 
his countrymen, the great lesson that you must look to 
Europe for warning, but for instructioUj to your fathers, 
and their God. 


















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